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'Shutter': Shudder at the thought

One of the smart things about Shutter is the title. It sounds like &quot;shudder&quot; – appropriate for a horror movie – and it calls attention to a major theme, which is the camera as an instrument of aggression.

One of the smart things about Shutter is the title. It sounds like "shudder" – appropriate for a horror movie – and it calls attention to a major theme, which is the camera as an instrument of aggression.

Before this movie is over, the camera will be employed as a weapon in a number of different ways by human and non-human agents.

At first, however, the camera is totally benign. Shutter opens with the wedding of Benjamin Shaw (Joshua Jackson, of Dawson's Creek fame) a fashion photographer, and Jane (Rachael Taylor), a Grade 6 English teacher.

What more happy and fitting occasion for photography than a wedding?

True, Benjamin seems to be overdoing it a bit when he brings the camera into the honeymoon suite. "Enough with the pictures," Jane says in a tone of mild annoyance. By the end of the movie she'll be ready to repeat those words in a screaming fit of horror.

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After the wedding the newlyweds head for Tokyo, where Benjamin has a new job. Their sojourn in Japan begins on a decidedly sour note when Jane, driving at night in the woods, runs over a woman. At least, she thinks it's a woman.

The audience knows better since the supposed accident victim is dressed in pale white and has vague facial features. Moreover, there's no trace of the woman when the police arrive.

Warning sign No. 1.

Warning side No. 2 occurs when Benjamin sets up the camera on a tripod and times it to photograph groom and bride on the hotel balcony. On the movie screen, the audience sees a close-up of the camera and tripod about to take the photograph.

Suddenly this camera seems very sinister. Nerve-tingling music is heard on the soundtrack. What can this camera be thinking?

It's no surprise when the finished photograph seems odd – there's a white blur next to the couple.

"Maybe I mis-loaded the film," a puzzled Benjamin says. Again, the audience knows better. You don't have to be a spiritualist to perceive that this white blur looks an awful lot like floating ectoplasm.

What we have here is a "spirit photo," a Victorian phenomenon that, as the movie points out, continues to this day, with various disembodied spirits communicating their strong feelings on film.

For the Shaws, the rest of the movie will consist of a relentless series of assaults by one particular spirit with extremely strong feelings to communicate. Jane, in particular, can hardly get a moment's peace.

Shutter, which has a reasonably coherent storyline for a movie of this genre, has two major problems.

The first has to do with rhythm.

In the best horror movies there's a slow build-up of tension – a series of events that seem slightly off, for example, but not blatantly paranormal, until the point when the characters are really in the soup.

With Shutter, that nerve-tingling soundtrack gets heavy use almost from the beginning of the movie. It becomes tiresome.

The second problem has to do with the nature of disembodied spirits.

As far as I understand it, even the most malicious ghosts have a limited repertoire of harmful moves, chief of which is their ability to scare the pants off you when they suddenly appear in your living room.

To do real damage they have to possess someone, like Jack Nicholson's character in The Shining.

There's something of that in this movie – one character is driven mad by the ghost and leaps to his death from his apartment balcony.

But, for the most part, the ghost seems more like a monster who can inflict physical punishment in a variety of gory and disgusting ways. That is certainly one way of keeping an audience on the edge of its collective seat, but ultimately this approach is less frightening than the approach of traditional ghost stories, where the warfare is almost entirely spiritual.

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